The beheading of King Louis XVI, an execution opposed by Thomas Paine, who favored Louis' exile to the United States

Economic Crisis

There had been the Glorious Revolution in England and the triumph of John Locke's ideology. John Locke's political ideas and the language of liberty prevailed also with the American Revolution. In France, intellectuals were aware of all this, and there had been Enlightenment champions favoring political change. But revolutions were not made by people guided just by ideas in books and words spoken in coffee houses. Revolutions were a phenomenon of social breadth that included masses of people who didn't read avante-guard books, and in France as elsewhere the drift toward revolution included to a great extent economic forces.

Between 1715 and 1771, French commerce had increased almost
eight-fold. France was second only to Great Britain
in trade. It was exporting sugar, coffee and indigo that
had been developed in its Caribbean colonies. Transportation
was improving. In the 1780s, for example, the 600 miles
between Paris and
Toulouse
was
only an eight-day journey, rather than the fifteen days it
had taken in the 1760s.

The royal palace at Versailles, in the country just outside Paris, where King Louis XVI was born, in 1754 – his home until 1789.

The front door.

But the advance in commerce did
not produce well-being for the common people. The population
of France had grown to between 24 and 26 million, up from 19 million in 1700 without a concomitant growth
in food production. Farmers around Paris consumed over 80
percent of what they grew, so if a harvest fell by around
10 percent, which was common, people went
hungry. There were insufficient government planning and storage
of grain for emergency shortages. Agriculture was three-quarters
of the economy but it was backward compared to the agricultures
of Britain and the Dutch Republic, and it was still
burdened by feudalistic arrangements. People suffered too
with a decline in the 1780s in France's
textile industry. The importation of
cheaper and better quality British textiles was creating
unemployment among France's
spinners and weavers.

The city of Paris had
a population of roughly 650,000, many of them getting by
without regular jobs. Alongside the unemployed textile
workers were people who sold second-hand goods or worked
at odd jobs such as carrying water. They too were hurt
by the rise of hard times. Paris had many who stayed alive
by petty thievery or prostitution – sometimes both. People
were being buried every day without ceremony in pauper's
graves. And many in Paris
and in other French cities were hungry.

France's government was in financial crisis. For years,
royal ministers believed that more revenues were needed
if France were to maintain its position in international
affairs and take care of domestic affairs. Originally kings of France paid the costs of rule from wealth produced
on their own domains – helped in emergencies from an assembly
of people who granted the royal treasury tax revenues. But
emergencies were now perpetual. During the Seven Years' War
and during France's help for the American Revolution
the monarchy had fallen deeper in debt. The government was
taxing common people regularly and paying half of its revenues
to cover debts owed to aristocrats and other lenders. Louis
XVI considered extending taxation to France's two privileged
orders: the nobility and the Catholic Church. With this
in mind and for other reforms (such as the elimination of
internal tariff barriers) the king's government convened a consultative body of nobles
and clergy called the Assembly of Notables. That was in February 1787. The nobles and
clergy remained opposed to paying taxes, and in May that year the
Assembly of Notables was dismissed. Plans were then laid
to convene a larger consultative body, the
Estates General. It consisted of members of the Church (the
First Estate), the nobility (the Second Estate) and all others
(the Third Estate). Plans for the first meeting of the Estates
General since 1614 were made for early 1789.

In July 1788, a hailstorm destroyed crops. France had its
worst harvest in forty years, and the winter of 1788-89
was severe. Getting no relief from their hunger, people
rioted. The economy declined further. In Paris, construction
workers were joining the ranks of the unemployed. People
were being evicted from their rented homes. With bread
more scarce, its price rose. People had been in the
habit of eating mainly bread, and it now took most of the
wages of those still working to obtain it.

The Church was
handing out bread and milk, and the king's economic minister,
Jacques Necker, was doing what he could. He forbade the
export of grain and launched a program to import food.
This was with little success. Food remained in short supply
in Europe in general and frozen rivers and canals were
hampering transport.